RACE AND TRAUMA

I am seeking 1-page abstracts or short papers (8 pages max.) for a proposed special session for the MLA conference in Toronto, December 27-30, 1997.

In the recent _MLA Newsletter_, I issued the following call for papers:

_Race and Trauma_ Witnessing, testimony, haunting, rememory, possession, genocide, middle passage, enslavement, persistence of prejudice, racialization, identification, interpellation, address, responsibility, impossibility: what are the possibilities, stakes, and dangers of articulating race and trauma? Abstracts or papers by 20 Mar.; Bruce Simon; bnsimon@princeton.edu

To expand on this brief description: the goal for the panel would be to put the work of trauma theorists (for example, Cathy Caruth, Avital Ronell, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Kali Tal, Dominick LaCapra, Geoffrey Hartman, Ruth Leys) in explicit dialogue with work being done in black, ethnic, and postcolonial studies and critical race theory. There are, of course, many ways of fulfilling this goal, some of which the above list and question suggest. A few more possibilities--meant simply as examples of possible approaches, not hard-and-fast questions that must be answered--follow:

What, for instance, might Caruth's rereading of Freud's _Moses and Monotheism_--as a response to the Nazis and as a rewriting of Exodus--have to say to proponents, theorists, and critics of black nationalism (for whom Exodus has had particular relevance)? What if taking racialization/racism seriously meant recognizing what liberal discourses would tend to dismiss as "accidents of birth" as, precisely, traumatic? But the questions can be put _to_ trauma theory, as well: in what ways might an engagement with the work of Hortense Spillers or Homi Bhabha (to take just two examples) change the kind of work trauma theorists do? Which critics, writers, and artists with less explicit psychoanalytic orientations have actually already been theorizing trauma, and how have they been going about it? More generally, which specific debates and problematics may be of interest both to those working primarily in "trauma theory" and those primarily in "race theory" (assuming, for the moment, that the two "sets" are close to "disjunct").

As these sample questions suggest, I am less interested in papers that seek to _apply_ models of trauma based on the experiences of survivors of the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and childhood sexual abuse (the three areas in which trauma theory has been most fully elaborated) to issues, problems, topics, themes or works having to do with race and racism (although measured amounts of this might at least be a start, depending on how it is handled). I am much more interested in papers that seek to think race and trauma together, in historically specific and politically critical ways.

I would appreciate hearing from those interested in participating in this proposed special session as soon as possible, and by March 20 at the latest. Thank you.

Bruce Simon
Department of English, 22 McCosh Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544

bnsimon@princeton.edu